Now That's Funny!: Jokes and Stories from the Man Who Keeps America Laughing

by Andy Simmons

  MEARA: Which is sad, because a lot of people came to Vegas for the prostitutes.

  STILLER: Not us.

  MEARA: Well, we don’t know.

  STILLER: What do you mean, “We don’t know?”

  AS: I couldn’t get a word in.

  AS: Interviews are often done over lunch, so as to create a relaxed atmosphere. What was the best meal you ever got out of an interview?

  AS: With out a doubt, the one with Robin Williams. We were in a lovely restaurant in Toronto, where he was shooting a movie. If I remember correctly, Robin had salmon, a Caesar salad, and an ice tea, while I ordered a lovely Niçoise salad, featuring hearty chunks of tuna. Not the kind that comes out of a can, mind you. The kind that comes out of an ocean. Robin was great. He even offered to pick up the tab. But one thing kept gnawing at me throughout our chat: Those damn Niçoise olives. They’re miniscule. Robin was going on about his life, his career, his addictions, his friendship with Christopher Reeve—all fascinating stuff. But all I could think of was, Why can’t they replace Niçoise olives with kalamata olives? Or those black, crinkly ones, what are they called? Better yet, why olives at all? Why not M&Ms? Everyone loves M&Ms. They’re easy to eat, and they don’t leave a mess on your hands.

  AS: Any megalomaniacs in the group?

  AS: Yes, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau. I asked him what he would do if he ruled the world.

  GARRY TRUDEAU: I’d ban reality shows. They’re not humiliating enough. The “stars” never figure out how appalling they are. For instance, when Jersey Shore’s The Situation looks in the mirror, he’s obviously very pleased with what he sees. Whereas if I ever looked in the mirror and saw The Situation staring back, I’d have to kill myself.

  AS: Any one ever bring you down?

  AS: Aside from you? Joy Behar with a story about one of her first gigs.

  JOY BEHAR: I was working the Catskills one time. The main speaker was an expert on the Holocaust—a brilliant, somber man. He ended his lecture by singing about the Holocaust. It was like one of those Jewish songs sung at funerals. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. When he finished, he left the stage to silence. Then the emcee came on stage to announce, “And now the comedy of Joy Behar!”

  AS: The opposite of downer was Mindy Kaling, who plays the narcissist Kelly Kapoor on The Office. When I asked Mindy what Kelly would do if she’d replaced Michael Scott as the new boss of Dunder Mifflin, she replied:

  MINDY KALING: Kelly’s number one priority would be to make the office look like the inside of her favorite store at the mall, Anthropologie. She’d get Nate Berkus in there to empty it out, make all the furniture sleeker, put a big contrast wall in there. Kelly would fire people she deemed insignificant so she’d have more money to make the office look great. Creed is gone, Meredith is gone, Kevin is gone—anyone who she thinks makes the office look uncool. But she’d think of a reason for doing it. I mean, she’s smart enough to know you can’t fire someone for being uncool.

  AS: Have you ever actually learned anything from the people you’ve interviewed?

  AS: Yes, from Alan Alda. He told me that people don’t like being cornered at parties—away from the interesting people, food, and drinks—and regaled with joke after awful joke by some dullard who doesn’t know when to stop. Had you heard this rule before? About not boring people at parties? Jokes, it seems, are out; wit and charm are in. This was the single biggest party-going revelation I’d encountered since my friend Ratso taught me the art of situating myself near the kitchen so that I wouldn’t get shut out from the hors d’oeuvres. Not being boring. I’m all over that!

  AS: I find it odd that people who would otherwise go out of their way to ignore you actually take the time to answer your questions, many of which, as we’ve discussed, are not particularly clever.

  AS: I know. Weird, right? And yet I’ve chatted with many of my favorite comedians, like Woody Allen, Lewis Black, Jerry Lewis, Richard Belzer, Carl Reiner, and Whitney Cummings, some of whom are represented here.

  Tragedy Tomorrow, Comedy Tonight: A Chat with Woody Allen

  America’s greatest living comic auteur can’t understand why everyone thinks he’s a bumbling schlemiel. Neurotic, maybe. But a schlemiel?

  “I was always an exceptionally fine athlete, always the first chosen in any schoolyard game,” insists Woody Allen. “I was popular in school. Always very successful. And so I never had any feelings of great schlemielism.”

  It’s his slight build and thick, black-rimmed glasses that have betrayed him, he says, before applying this remarkable label to himself: “If there’s such a thing as Joe Six-Pack, that’s me. When I get home from work tonight, I’m not going to snap open Dostoyevsky. I’m going to get out a beer and watch the Yankees.”

  This, from a man who puts Schopenhauer number one on his list of funniest German philosophers. This from a man who can put Schopenhauer on any list.

  Allen is undoubtedly a victim of his own success. He became famous playing roles like the abused product tester (abused by the products!) with the schlemielesque name Fielding Mellish in Bananas, who, when summoned by a South American dictator, arrives with a box of Danish pastries (because you never go empty-handed to someone’s home). And in Take the Money and Run, he portrayed an inept bank robber who has trouble convincing the tellers he’s serious, which might have lent some oomph to that perception, too.

  Though he may be a beer-swilling Yankees fan, the fact is, Allen has never been just the guy next door. And his earliest recollections in comedy bear that out.

  It was the mid-’50s and the twenty-year-old Allen had found the Holy Grail of humor-writing for Sid Caesar’s Caesar’s Hour. He’d be working alongside future legends Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Larry Gelbart. Although the writers were, to a man, mensches (Brooks, he says, was particularly “lovely to work with”), the crazed Caesar was intimidating.

  One day Caesar summoned Allen and Gelbart to his house to work on a script. There, Caesar and Gelbart decided to indulge in a steam bath. Not Allen.

  “I wouldn’t take my clothes off. I just didn’t feel right doing it,” he says, horrified at the thought of appearing naked in front of his boss. “And you know, they thought I was the oddball. I mean, the two of them peel off their clothes at the drop of a hat and get into a steam bath, and I’m the oddball.” He was sounding downright schlemielly before further explaining, “I was not a cigar-smoking, one-of-the-guys getting into steam baths. I was, you know, more fragile.”

  What Allen is is complex. Don’t file him under “nut” and leave it at that; otherwise you’ll miss out on the tangled genius that marks his work. He’s one of the few filmmakers capable of delivering hysterical one-liners (“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying”), followed by a brilliant sight gag or a bit of inspired slapstick. He’s the equivalent of the Beatles, trading ballads with hard rock.

  Allen used this complexity to launch an incredibly successful film career on his own terms. Early on, he decided he would make the sort of movies he loved growing up.

  “When I was a kid,” he says, “I enjoyed sophisticated comedy, movies with Champagne corks popping and people dressing for dinner and talking on white telephones and making witty conversation. Or the Marx Brothers or W. C. Fields—you know, kind of a very high level of comedy.”

  Of course, he added some decidedly Woody Allen modifications to his flicks. Instead of a William Powell or a Myrna Loy, you’ll meet characters who are “bright Upper East Side New Yorkers,” he says, “who are in psychoanalysis and have difficulty with their interpersonal relationships.”

  Allen uses film to examine just how unfair life can be. In his movie Vicky Cristina Barcelona he has one of his characters say of his father, a poet who refuses to publish his work, “He affirms life in spite of everything.”

  “I am, unfortunately, not like that character. I’m like the squire in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal,” says Allen, of a servant
who follows his knight to his death. “I go at the end, but under protest.

  “Moral dilemmas are the same now as they were in the beginning of time. People are predatory and competitive,” he says matter-of-factly. “The issues today may be global warming and Darfur, but it’s the same thing. We still don’t like each other. I always felt if the bigots got their way and they eliminated all the blacks and all the Jews, then they would turn on the next group of people and the next group. Finally, when there were just two people left on earth, the right-hander would turn on the left-hander.”

  Of course, the obvious question when discussing moral dilemmas with Woody Allen would be to raise his own, particularly the Woody/Mia/Soon-Yi fiasco. For those of you living in a monastery in the ’90s, Soon-Yi was Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter. Woody was Mia’s beau. It got ugly quickly after the fifty-six-year-old Woody lit out with the twenty-one-year-old Soon-Yi. The two have been married for fifteen years and have two children.

  I don’t ask about it, though. It’s lousy journalism, I know. But the topic has been played to death. And besides, I like the guy. He’s as pleasant as can be, and his telltale New Yawkese has put me at ease. Besides, like most fans, even if I don’t condone what he did, I can relate to his neurosis and his defiant “I’m no schlemiel” stance.

  So instead I ask the only question that pops to mind: “Why are you so depressing?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s chemical,” he says. “My mother said when I turned five, I turned gloomy.”

  How gloomy? One of his least favorite movies is the Frank Capra life-affirming tearjerker, It’s a Wonderful Life.

  “I think it’s dopey,” he says.

  The movie, of course, is a shot of curare to a life-stinks kind of guy like Woody Allen.

  “So how would you remake it so it’s not dopey?”

  “I’d make it,” he says, “where the guardian angel saves Jimmy Stewart’s life on the bridge and Jimmy Stewart decides to become a serial killer.”

  “Why don’t you just find God?” I ask Allen. “Wouldn’t it make your life easier?”

  Allen is a nonbeliever. He famously summed up his position this way: “To you, I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.”

  “If you actually have faith, if you believe that there’s more to life in a positive sense, then of course it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing,” he says.

  But…

  “I can’t bring myself to do it. If I’m sitting next to a guy and he has true belief, I look at him and think, Poor thing, you really are deluded. But,” he concedes, “his life is much better than mine.”

  What keeps Woody Allen from going over the brink is his work, one reason he has averaged a film a year over the past decade. Beyond film, he was able to direct a Puccini comedy for the Los Angeles Opera. “I got badgered into it,” he whines. “I would rather coach the New York Knicks than direct the opera.…I think I could do a better job coaching the Knicks.”

  In the meantime, Allen keeps churning out more films. And the schlemiel/depressive/comic genius…whatever…sounds genuinely happy. His work relaxes him, he says. “It’s like therapy for an inpatient in an institution.”

  The Funniest Person I Know: Carl Reiner on Mel Brooks

  I’ve known Mel since 1950 when we both worked on Your Show of Shows. One day, I suggested we do a skit where we re-create the news.

  To prove it could work, I turned to Mel out of the blue and said, “Here’s a man who was actually at the scene of the crucifixion two thousand years ago, isn’t that true, sir?”

  And he said, “Oh, boy.”

  “And you knew Jesus?”

  “Oh, sure. Thin boy, used to come into the store, never bought anything. Used to come in with twelve other guys. All they ever asked for was water.”

  Now, Sid Caesar was the greatest sketch comic. He was a method actor and didn’t know it. We were working on a skit using pickles. He’s holding an imaginary jar and struggling to get the lid off. Finally, he opens it. But there was no laugh in it, and we said no, it didn’t work. But as we moved on to something else, he pantomimed twisting the imaginary lid back on the imaginary jar and placed it down on an imaginary table. He wasn’t even aware he was doing it.

  But with Mel, I never knew what he would say. Once I asked the two-thousand-year-old man what’s the difference between comedy and tragedy. He ad-libbed, “Tragedy is when I get a paper cut on my finger. Comedy is if you fall down an open manhole.” I still see him almost every night, and if I’m bored, I just pose a question to the two-thousand-year-old man, and he never ceases to amaze me.

  Robin Williams Grows Up (Just a Little)

  Robin Williams likes to work without a net. If you’ve ever seen a recording of him onstage, you know what I mean. His shows are totally improvised: no canned jokes, no dress rehearsal, no repeating lines that worked the night before.

  His movies aren’t a whole lot different. They may always start with a script, but where it goes after that is anyone’s guess. Williams himself often doesn’t have a clue.

  So as I awaited the comedian at a table in a Toronto restaurant, incessantly testing the batteries on my digital tape recorder, I was prepared to be greeted by Williams reciting the Gettysburg Address as James Brown or using a Croatian accent while performing a German slap dance. Instead, the man who took a seat opposite me was a subdued, normal guy—who happens to be abnormally funny.

  Andy Simmons: You trained at Juilliard, a very serious acting school. When did you start concentrating on humor?

  Robin Williams: I left school and couldn’t find acting work, so I started going to clubs where you could do stand-up. I’ve always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden it was just me and the audience.

  AS: What’s that like, working in front of a live audience?

  RW: It’s frightening and exhilarating. It’s like combat.

  Look at the metaphors: You kill when it works; you die when it doesn’t.

  AS: You bomb.

  RW: Bombing is bad. Killing is good.

  AS: Do you remember your first routine?

  RW: Vaguely. It was in San Francisco, in the ’70s, at this place called The Committee. I was a football quarterback on acid—kind of a funky Lawrence Welk, like Welk doing Soul Train. It was a pretty wild time.

  AS: There are different kinds of humorists—the political type like Jon Stewart, or the more observational kind like Jerry Seinfeld. How would you define your humor?

  RW: It’s kind of the lazy Susan effect. It has samples of all—blue, some very personal observations, some political observations, some world observations, some making fun of the celebrity world, and it’s insanity and hype. It kind of goes everywhere.

  AS: Do you work from a script?

  RW: No. It’s more like headlines. “German Pope.” You build off a topic and explore how far you can go.

  AS: Do you practice?

  RW: No, I don’t practice anything. I spend time looking over ideas and then just get out and do it. Even when I did my Broadway show, I did fifteen minutes no one had seen before, because that was the night that Michael Jackson protested about Al Sharpton bailing on him. I said, “Wow, if that man bails on you, this must be really a lost cause.”

  AS: Wouldn’t it be safer to script it?

  RW: Safer is not a good thing.

  AS: Do you ever self-censor?

  RW: People would say I never censor. As Billy Crystal says, “I don’t have that button.”

  AS: Is anything not funny to you?

  RW: Anything that is not funny at a certain point will be funny.

  AS: You’ve gotten away with stuff others wouldn’t. Why?

  RW: Maybe it’s a likability, that I seem fluffy. Occasionally I will be angry—someone will really push the button. But I always came from the idea that I enjoy this. It’s a blast. Maybe that keeps it from being intense.

  AS: At this point do you consider yourself a comic first, then an actor, or vic
e versa?

  RW: For me, they’re interchangeable. They feed each other nicely. And comedy pays the bills if I can’t find a film.

  AS: You grew up outside Detroit, and your father, Robert, worked in the auto industry. What family vacations did you take?

  RW: There weren’t that many, because Dad was working so much. I remember going to New York once—I’d never been in the city—and the noises at night and looking out the window. You would hear everything, and those garbage trucks.

  AS: Why do you now live in San Francisco as opposed to Hollywood or New York?

  RW: My father retired to San Francisco, and I got a chance to know him and be around him. It’s always been someplace where everything changed for the better. It’s always been a home for me. And up to that point, I’d been at an all-boys private school. All of sudden I was in a coeducational school. There were girls everywhere. They weren’t brought in for dances and then taken away. And the first time I saw fog, I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was poison gas. “What’s that, Dad?”

  AS: Tell us more about your father.

  RW: He worked for Lincoln-Mercury when they made great cars. His job was to troubleshoot, to travel around to different dealerships, and eventually he saw the company’s quality go downhill. They offered him loads of cash to stay, and he said no thanks. For me he’s always been this very ethical guy.

  AS: How does that show up in your life now?

  RW: I have like a no-fly zone with doing commercial endorsements and product placements. That’s a residual from Dad. I just want to do movies, and I want to sell them. I don’t want to link up with some product.

  AS: Lots of actors won’t endorse products in America, but will do commercials in Japan. What do you think of that?

  RW: Number one, financially, I don’t have to do it. Number two, the people who do it, God bless them, but you think, Why does he need to do that? He’s got hundreds of millions of dollars. Unless it’s like Paul Newman with salad dressing, where the money goes to charity. If I could do something like that with a product, I would.